Thank you, Facebook.

Who knew?  Facebook got us back together after more than 30 years.

Drove 8 hours round trip yesterday to meet with a German Professor I hadn't seen since 1978.

Dagmar and Mohsin in the Streamliner diner.

She has hardly changed, and she has netted herself a handsome, funny Egyptian husband, named Mohsin. See if I'm wrong.  That fedora is from Chicago, where else?

We had a hugely fun time in the town of Bainbridge, on Bainbridge Island, in the Puget Sound.

Me and Dagmar on the Bainbridge Village waterfront pathway park.

Okay, so following our noses to a wonderful local café, blathering our heads off about ghosts and shouldn't teachers receive an Oscar as performance artists, just for starters, and walking along the waterfront trail, finding the magical Madrona grove,  and finally going back and having even MORE strong coffee may not sound like an exciting day of surfing or landing badly in wingsuits, but we enjoyed it.

Thankfully, people aren't carving initials on trees so much any more, but simply writing notes. Ours are very tiny, so you probably can't see them, but we know where they are.

Dagmar can still drop one eyelid without moving another muscle in her face.  It's still just as funny.

We really don't need much to sleep dry.

In the Bainbridge shoreline walking park we found a hut made of broken branches and big-leaf maple leaves.  After a day's rain, the inside of this little shelter was completely dry.

Thank you, Facebook. Even if we never meet up again, I'll remember this day forever.

Writer's Block With A Crossbow

There's the friend whose brother cleaned out the burial fund, and used their father's body to run the HOV lane to a cheap cremation.  

And my college professor who worked with a woman who came over with her husband with the von Braun gang, and years later settled in Illinois.  There, the couple had problems with a deer eating the roses.  They applied for a permit to shoot the deer.  The state gave them one.  They were allowed to shoot the deer.

As long as they did it with a crossbow.

And people are still complaining about Writer's Block because they can't think of any ideas.....

(Somebody in the State of Illinois was/is pretty cool.)

The cure for too much holiday party

Sooner or later on a holiday, you have to get out of the house.

Everybody, including the cats, is turkey up to HERE.

Merry Stinzmas!

Stinz putting out hay for the birds and the poor half-horses.

Process or DRAW.

So.... do I spend all my time trying to process my books, or do I use it to make new art and pages?

I'm not getting any younger, so it may be up to others to get a lot of the additional book-processing done. I can stick smaller page counts up on Indyplanet or collections up on Amazon, but taking time to re-process into Kindle - considering my hundreds of books - is just going to eat up all my remaining years.  Flogging at publishers before starting a project just eats up hours.

A quicky sketch from many years ago. Yes, you can pay me to do anything from a scribble to an epic.

I'm not trying to be all whiny or gloomy, but there's a reality here.  Art takes time. Writing takes time. It's that or process.  Process disappears.  You can work your butt off on the ebooks and pdfs and paper versions, but all somebody has to do is fail their site or decide to change it, and years of work can disappear overnight.

So I'm sorry if all the stuff isn't going to be available everywhere all at once.  You'll get the new stuff on the easiest sites, or the most long-running sites.  I'm not going to run my head off any more to try to keep it all covered.  When somebody else figures out how to pay themselves by harnessing my author engine, you'll get the full coverage.  It can't be THAT hard, can it?

I'll try to keep updates going on the Bookstore (see it in the links, this page).  I'll very much appreciate any reports to me of problems or broken links.

In the meantime, I'll keep inking, scanning, coloring.  And taking time for commissions, because those are REAL.

I'm going to be SO rich when I'm dead.  Those people in my will to take care of my cats are going to be so happy.

Beans and Eggs for Solstice 2011

Just wrapped spices, tobacco, stick of anise in a page from an art catalog, and added that bundle and the last egg we had - the last egg of the old year from our hens - and gifted it to the roaring fire in Betsy the Stove.  If that doesn't tell the sun it's welcome, I dunno what will.  Boiling beans for the new year. Now keep me well enough after all this crud for the yearly chips-n-chicken (or fish) and Mac-N-Jack dinner at the Clallam Bay Inn.

Fearless and the Solstice Tree (Any pressies for kitties?).

Holiday Card 2011

Hi!  Click this image, download it, print it out on 8.5" x 11" paper of your choice, fold it up -- ta da! For those of you would like a paper card.  Let's face it, paper and posting is an 18th-century technology; we might as well get ahead of the curve.  Have a Happy Merry and remember -- after Solstice, the sun starts coming back!  (The gold roses are from our yard).